My top three quotes from the Scrum Primer

Specialisation

“Each member of the Team is just a team member. Notice there are no fixed specialist titles in a group that adopts Scrum; there is no BA, no DBA, no architect, no team lead, no programmer, no tester, …”

That is profound. And something that is, at times, very difficult to achieve. Do you have someone in your team that likes to specialise or focus on a certain skill? Is knowledge sharing a challenge? Who is in the team?

Technology and professionalism tends to lead us down a path of ‘specialisation’. At times I think this is counter productive. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been required to wait for the ‘specialist’ to get involved.

The ‘wait for others’ mentality is something I try to reduce.

Seniority

“Scrum does not require engineers to seek advice from more experience engineers about complex technical problems.”

Absolutely! Again this is all about getting things moving forwards.

The idea that each technically minded person needs to get the sign off and approval from someone more senior comes at a cost.

Fast moving collaboration is hard to come by but it’s key to agility.

Management

“There is no role for a Project Manager is scrum. There is no need for one.”

It’s very cool how agile practices try to avoidance ‘long term’ strategy and active delegation. It makes a lot of sense to me.